Members Alarmed by End-Run around Democracy at Buffalo Health Care Local

Things had been tense for some time inside the leadership of Communications Workers (CWA) Local 1168, a 4,800-member health care union based near Buffalo, New York. Still, it was a high-functioning local with a busy calendar of events, stewards handling grievances, organizers pursuing leads, and leaders organizing at work.

So it was a surprise to members in June when their parent union, CWA, put the local into trusteeship, at the request of the local’s president and seven of the nineteen executive board members.

Trusteeship meant the union’s bylaws and elected leaders were suspended, and most of its work temporarily ground to a halt. The appointed Director of Organizing and Mobilizing Mary Nowocien and elected Vice President Patrick Weisansal II found themselves locked out of their group chats, email, and union hall, and facing an internal union prosecution.

A staffer of CWA District 1, Erin Spaulding, was assigned as trustee—tasked with maintaining the functioning of the local, setting up and overseeing judicial processes for the charges against officers, and making a plan to return the union to local control.

Nowocien and Weisansal saw the sudden trusteeship as an escalation of a long-running conflict and a deliberate undermining of the upcoming union elections. Weisansal had just announced his intention to run against incumbent President Cori Gambini.

Now the elections are on hold until the trials are over, whenever that is. And lately, the employer has been taking advantage of the turmoil in the union.

While the allegations are serious, members are concerned that the trusteeship was a nuclear option for an internal financial matter and that it has torn apart relationships at the local, weakened opposition to management’s schemes and denied democratic processes to an active, engaged union membership.

ALLEGED TIMECARD ISSUES

The trusteeship filing lists the cause as “serious allegations of financial misconduct” from officers and “dueling charges” between leaders.

Gambini and Executive Vice President Robert Andruszko had accused Nowocien and Weisansal of defrauding the local of thousands of dollars, by getting paid by both the union and their employer for the same hours worked, and by falsifying records. These issues came to light during a timecard audit in the fall of 2025 by their employer, Kaleida Health.

Nowocien and Weisansal acknowledged there were significant errors on old timecards and paychecks, but said it was the product of the employer’s faulty timekeeping and payroll system, and human error. The majority of other officers also had issues, they pointed out, but only some were being singled out for discipline by the local and the employer.

Spaulding, the trustee, interviewed all the suspended officers and allowed the majority to return to their paid positions—with the exception of Nowocien, Weisansal, and three others not facing any charges: the Communications and Political Directors and one of the Area Vice Presidents. Also fired were two longtime staff organizers, on the grounds that there was no work for them to do, according to one, Ann Converso, who had recently helped organize a new unit of substance use disorder counselors and was gearing up for their first contract fight.

Many current leaders on both sides of this schism were part of a reform caucus in Local 1168, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Healthcare Employees (CORHE), which dissolved when they won their positions in 2020.

Since winning, Gambini and a few others have butted heads with Weisansal, Nowocien, and others over how to tackle problems. The latter camp frequently organized their facility—Buffalo General Hospital, the union’s largest unit—to push back against management’s changes and violations. Gambini and leaders aligned with her argued that that wasn’t the right approach—that they had to pick their fights and not overextend the membership, according to Weisansal.

One Buffalo General steward, who asked to not be named, said members were appalled that the trustee had removed elected officers. “If our employer treated one of our members in a similar fashion,” the steward said, “union leadership would rally around them and fight to return them to their position!”

Spaulding wrote in a public FAQ posted on the local’s social media that the temporary administration “is not intended to be punitive or find guilt against any individual in the Local. It is intended to stabilize the Local while issues are investigated and resolved.” She also wrote that staffing decisions were made based on “operational needs of the local, nature of pending charges, and interviews conducted with each board member [by the trustee].”

CWA, Spaulding, and Gambini did not respond to requests for comment. Re-instated Area Vice President Kim Kornowski emailed Labor Notes, writing, “we are a democratic union that includes our members in all aspects of our work. In 2020, we ran together on the C.O.R.H.E. slate and implemented our platform. A few board members engaged in serious financial misconduct, and we requested that the local be placed under trusteeship while these issues are addressed.”

A THOUSAND SIGNATURES

Some of the former members of CORHE re-formed as a committee and started reaching out to members. They drafted a petition to the trustee, asking for a general membership meeting, an end to the trusteeship, a neutral election to be held this fall, and for the elected officers to be returned to their positions in the meantime. In the local’s bylaws, if 20 percent of the members (around 1000 people) request a meeting, leadership is compelled to hold one.

The members of the reorganized CORHE worked to get the petition signed: they printed paper copies, talked to co-workers, and asked colleagues in different units to gather signatures.

Weisansal said he appealed to people’s commitment to union democracy. “The in-person membership meeting we were supposed to have got canceled,” he said. “There’s been a lot of anger about the [virtual] town hall calls, [because] they filter the questions. People aren’t stupid, and they're angry.

“What has been helpful is not asking people to be the judge or jury,” he said. “What we’re asking is, do you believe in democracy, and if members should be able to make decisions about their own union.”

Nowocien and Weisensal are well-known union activists, so many members were eager to sign on in their defense. “There are still a lot of good people in this union that see how wrong this is all going,” said Ashley Emminger, a mobilizer at Buffalo General. “They just want this [trusteeship] to end, to have the people we elected back where they belong, and elections move forward.”

Weisansal and Nowocien have had to fight for their positions before. In 2019 they were removed from the Local 1168 board by a previous leadership, they say in retaliation for their organizing. (Gambini was not present for that vote, and fought for them to be reinstated.) At that time, they gathered the signatures to compel a membership meeting, 200 people showed up to support them, and the two were returned to their positions. The following year, Weisansal won the vice presidency and Nowocien was appointed to her special director role.

By camping out in cafeterias and parking garages, the committee collected 1,000 signatures within a few weeks. Kaleida management called a few petition-gatherers into investigatory meetings for using company space and “harassing” members. The petitioners maintained that their activities were legally protected, but they moved the petition-gathering online after that. (Kaleida declined to comment on these meetings.)

Weisansal emailed the 1,000 signatures to the trustee, to CWA District 1, and to the national CWA leadership in September. However, with the bylaws suspended, the trustee was not compelled to hold a membership meeting, and the caucus received a notice from District 1 deferring to the trustee.

The Buffalo General steward said co-workers who signed feel as if their voices don’t matter.

LEADERS FIRED

Shortly after the petition was sent in, Nowocien and Weisansal got word that they were being investigated again by the employer, Kaleida Health, for similar instances of timecard irregularities, but going back to 2024, spurred by the union’s investigations.

Then they were both terminated for 2024 timecard issues.

Weisansal thinks the case is weak: he has 16 years of service and no disciplinary record, and was fired just now for a paperwork error he had already communicated to his manager about. Nowocien has 20 years of service at Buffalo General.

Now, while Weisansal and Nowocien focus on their wrongful termination cases, other caucus members are continuing to speak up about workplace issues, bring in new members, and push for elections to be scheduled.

A third CORHE leader was fired right before publication of this article, apparently for one timecard infraction.

Kaleida had already audited timecards for 19 union board members and appointed directors in 2025, and found discrepancies for 16 of them. Labor Notes obtained a copy of the spreadsheet that Kaleida Human Resources sent to the board delineating the errors and the action to be taken by members and employer to remedy the errors. Several of those officers paid back amounts they had over-received, or were compensated by Kaleida Health for 2025 errors, according to Nowocien and Weisansal.

No one received disciplinary action at the time, and the comments in the spreadsheet show that management was aware that its timekeeper system was to blame for the majority of the errors. Only Nowocien and Weisansal were investigated for timecard issues prior to 2025.

Kaleida declined to comment on its timekeeping system or the process of reconciling errors.

It was after Kaleida’s first investigation that Gambini moved, in fall of 2025, to open up a union investigation into timecard issues as well. The board agreed to spend $10,000 on an auditor, but the findings were never released to the board, according to Nowocien and others. However, the president singled out Weisansal and Nowocien, and warned them that union disciplinary action could be coming for their discrepancies.

Then in May 2026, just before the trusteeship, Weisensal and Nowocien said that President Gambini encouraged them to resign from the board and forfeit their memberships, threatening that otherwise the FBI and Department of Labor would get involved and that they would be banned from holding any CWA position in the future. They declined, they said, because they had not seen any written charges or specifics about the accusations.

Local 1168 has hired two more auditors since October 2025, and members are awaiting the results. Emminger, the mobilizer at Buffalo General, is upset with the lack of transparency and the spending of member’s dues: “They have not been transparent about anything.”

REVERBERATIONS AT WORK

A smart employer knows: Never waste a crisis. Patients and staff at Kaleida Health may notice the effects of a distracted CWA 1168.

“Kaleida is 100 percent capitalizing on this dysfunction to push through changes,” Weisansal said.

Converso, the organizer laid off after 16 years, said “if we [Nowocien and Converso] were still there, we would be in the streets with everything Kaleida is doing.”

One change includes getting rid of a cardiac monitoring unit and shifting around the responsibility for heart monitoring to circumvent the 1:4 nurse-to-patient ratio mandated by the staffing committee and contract.

Emminger voted for the CORHE slate in 2020 and then got heavily involved in the union because of their organizing focus. She says there has been no mobilization since the trusteeship, when before they would have been pushing back against the short staffing.

“This tells the employer that staffing is not a priority, and this will harm us in the next contract,” she said “They are taking full advantage of this witch hunt, and the proof is in the department changes and job deletions.”

The changes will mean more work for nursing staff and less oversight of patients with serious heart problems, according to Nowocien and former Area Vice President Jennifer Hogue, another of the five removed officers. Kaleida declined to comment.

Hogue has been telling members they can fight back against these changes, even without the support of union leadership: “We are not giving the employer a free pass to do whatever they want.”

…AND BEYOND

But the reverberations also extend beyond Local 1168’s own shops. The union has been an important force in the local labor movement, and especially a support to its sister union, CWA Local 1133.

Labor Notes profiled Local 1133’s strike in 2021 at Mercy Health, where it represents 2,000 health care workers; Local 1168 represents smaller units in the same chain, Catholic Health. Though the contract barred them from striking all at once, leaders and staff like Weisansal and Converso were “loaned” to Local 1133 to help build the organizing capacity of the strike, which won safer staffing ratios.

“I wouldn’t have survived our strike without any of those three [Nowocien, Weisansal, and Converso],” said now-retired Local 1133 mobilizer Bob Scime. “They were rocks for me personally, and our whole local, and they kept our lines going. I always feel a sense of gratitude to them.

“I can say the same thing about Erin [Spaulding, the trustee] when we were on strike, she was a rock too, and Cori [Gambini, the president], too. Sign of the labor movement today, that we’re fighting among ourselves. It’s the members who are suffering for it,” said Scime.

The bargaining teams and leaders of 1133 and 1168 have organized for the last few years to line up their contract expiration dates, so any future strikes could be coordinated and leverage power for health care workers in Buffalo. Their next contract expiration is in May 2028, when Weisansal had hoped that Local 1168 would join in United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain’s call for coordinated labor action.

As the seasons change, Hogue, the former Membership Functions Chair, is also grieving the loss of an annual tradition: the CWA 1168 Halloween Party. “Normally this is a community where people feel like they belong,” she said.